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I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this, but it seemed to be mainly a PC issue:

Given I have an old laptop with a Firewire port,
And I have a DVD recorder with a Firewire input port, (Magnavox, but if I thought the model mattered I wouldn't have posted this here)
If I get a cheap 4-pin to 4-pin Firewire cable,
Then is there some free or very cheap software I could use to stream generic videos from the PC to the DVD recorder?

I found a similar thread from 2004 (one year older than my laptop) but it seemed to need a $150 card. This is a laptop, and I wouldn't spend more than the cost of a VGA to composite converter on this. (Which appears to be $20.)

Primarily recording. I could burn a DVD+RW, play it in a DVD player and record on the DVD recorder - I've done that before. But I think taking the video directly from a laptop should be more convenient.

If I'm guessing correctly, you have video files on your laptop in some format (let's say mpeg or avi or mp4 or something) you want to convert these to DVD (vob files) correct? If so and you already have a DVDRW on the laptop, all you need is a video editor software app. There would be no need to send video to an external player (via firewire or usb or otherwise). Most video editing software can generate DVD Video TS files that you can burn to a hard media. I am wondering much like pittsoccer why you would need to do this?

Given there is a television show I want to record every week,
And I have a receiver for my DVD recorder,
Then I can record that TV show every week to DVD...
Except if there is another show on at the same time that I also want to record to a different DVD.
In that case I can record one show to my computer with my TV tuner card, after which I can either:
- re-encode the show to DVD format, burn it to a temporary DVD+RW, and play it back on another DVD player to transfer to the DVD recorder.
- Or play back the show on my laptop to transfer it to the DVD recorder.

Make sense? See why playing from the laptop could be much simpler? Now, can I do it with Firewire, or should I go with the VGA-to-composite thing instead?

(At this point, nobody's likely to respond before I get the VGA-to-composite thing, but I'll wait maybe a couple of hours.)

Edit: I finally gave this enough thought to realize neither cable/converter is what I really want. What I really want is a streaming media player. I'll look into that later.